File System Directories for Dialogs, Grammars, and Prompts

Portal Server 7.1 software has specific directories for the various provider components. This section discusses the directories for:

• Dialogs

• Grammars

• Prompts

Dialogs

The dialog files for each voice application are stored in a separate directory that includes the name of the application, the presentation format (vxml) and the name of the voice browser vendor (Nuance).

For a weather application, the dialog files would be stored in:

/var/opt/SUNWportal/portals/portal1/desktop/default/vxml/Nuance

where portal1 is the name of the Portal.

Grammars

If your application uses external grammar files, they should be stored in the web server’s document root, or in some other well-known location within the Portal Server 7.1 web application.

To make the application accessible from the voice Portal Desktop, you must create a second grammar file that allows users to select the application. The grammar for the channel must be unique across all of the voice-enabled channels. For consistency, the grammar should allow users to optionally speak the word channel after the name of the channel.

For example, the following grammar allows weather or weather channel:

Weather [ (weather ?channel) ]

Name this file weather.grammar and store the file in the following directory:

/opt/SUNWportal/web-src/jsp/default/weather/vxml/Nuance/grammars

Prompts

The voice prompts are located in the following directory:

/opt/SUNWwbsvr/docs/voice/en_US/prompts/gary

The path element gary is the name of the default persona—the person whose voice appears on the recording. If you record new prompts, you should create a new directory for the new persona. This new directory could be named after the person who recorded the prompts.

For example:

/opt/SUNWwbsvr/docs/voice/en_US/prompts/cheryl

Voice prompt file names use the following naming convention:

• Use the words of the prompt in lower case as the file name.

• Use an underscore character between words of the phrase. For example: word_word.

• Truncate the file name at 50 characters, leaving an additional 4 characters for the .wav extension

  To use this prompt directory in your voice application, add the path /voice/en_US/prompts/cheryl (or the path to your prompts) before the prompt file name.

  For example, if your prompts were stored in a prompts/ sub-directory, replace this statement:

  <audio src="’thats_it.wav’" />

  with:

  <audio src="’/voice/en_US/prompts/cheryl/thats_it.wav’" />

  For localization convenience, you might want to define some VoiceXML variables in your application’s root document, and construct the path from this:

• <var name="root" expr="’/voice’" /> <var name="locale" expr="’en_US’" /> <var name="prompts_directory" expr="’prompts’" /> <var name="persona" expr="’cheryl’" /> <var name="promptPath" expr="root + ’/’ + locale + ’/’ + prompts_directory + ’/’ + persona + ’/’" />

  Then use the promptPath variable as follows, using expr= instead of src=:

• <audio expr="promptPath + ’thats_it.wav’" />